Would it be possible to open that up to OXP control, so that ship builders could do all the hard work of figuring out the quaternions themselves, if they chose to do so?

Allowing a non-fixed quaternion at all is the hard part. Working out what it should be - especially for basic convergence control - is relatively easy, as is allowing OXPs to set non-fixed quaternions if they're possible.

Understood.. consider this a request to file this idea under under "nice feature to add next time I'm in the mood to twist my brain into a pretzel", then..

_________________Most games have some sort of paddling-pool-and-water-wings beginning to ease you in: Oolite takes the rather more Darwinian approach of heaving you straight into the ocean, often with a brick or two in your pockets for luck. ~ Disembodied

OK, so basically when you buy the ship you choose between having an immense amount of firepower but lasers that overheat quickly or roughly the same amount of firepower but looking cooler and a slightly decreased accuracy. Could you combine the options for different facings, e.g. the two weaker ones forward, and two full power ones aft? Or is this only going to be available as a forward weapon?

You can have any number of mounts on any of the four facings - but you must have all facings as "split" or all facings as "multiply".

You can simulate having a mix of "split" and "multiply" facings by using custom weapons - in your example, you could set the ship to "multiply", but equip a custom laser on the forward mount which had half the heat, damage and energy use per shot of a standard laser.

If the lasers are seperate mounts, shouldn't they be totaly independent on heating and power out though would double power use?
And as for target convergence, a simple crystal prisim arrangement on each laser, controlled by your targetting array (it does tell range) would make it infinitly adjusting.
As with the Imperial courier, I have often taken it's lasers out one at a time for fun.
Just a thought.

_________________LOOK OUT!!!OOPS.."Press Space" Commander
If you do not see "Press Space" more often than you want.. Your not trying!

If the lasers are seperate mounts, shouldn't they be totaly independent on heating and power out though would double power use?

I think the idea is to make player ships that look good, without creating Uber-Commanders into the bargain.

Quote:

And as for target convergence, a simple crystal prisim arrangement on each laser, controlled by your targetting array (it does tell range) would make it infinitly adjusting.

Heh.. at least your handwavium is "simple".. the in-game implementation, however, would be even tougher than what I originally suggested..
(I do love your idea, though!)

_________________Most games have some sort of paddling-pool-and-water-wings beginning to ease you in: Oolite takes the rather more Darwinian approach of heaving you straight into the ocean, often with a brick or two in your pockets for luck. ~ Disembodied

In tonight's nightly build we will be able to query the game via JS for the current array of resource paths used. This array can be easily used to retrieve the list of installed OXPs, even if they don't contain any worldscripts.

The commit enabling this is 4bdcf8e, the property is oolite.resourcePaths and an example of output is shown below:

A quick little featurette for tormorrow's nightly. Two new JS methods under the JS Player class, namely audioMessage("message") and stopAudioMessage().

The first one is available at speech options setting Comms Only and higher and basically speaks the message given as argument without displaying anything on the screen. This is its main difference to the player.consoleMessage method, which does display the string given and speaks it only at the All spken messages level. Also, it does not prefix the message with "Incoming Message", as player.commsMessage does. It just speaks it and that's it. Chatty passengers anyone?

The second one just stops any spoken message that happens to play at the time of its execution.